Zoo

Matador;
2012

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The first 7" I bought, when I was 13 or 14, was Minor Threat's "Salad Days". This was in 8th grade, or my first year in high school, so we're talking the late 1980s/early 1990s, though the record came out earlier, in 1985. The three-song EP was Minor Threat's last 7", the one that featured slower songs, an acoustic guitar, church chimes (or, at least that's what I thought of them as), and a cover of the Standells' "Sometimes Good Guys (Don't Wear White)". I was too young to realize Ian MacKaye and company were fucking with the hardcore template and looking beyond the genre's horizon, but they were: Those songs worked as a bridge to "Waiting Room" and the rest of Fugazi's self-titled 1988 EP and onward. All to say: Hardcore bands deciding to stop doing hardcore is not a new thing.

The Bay Area quintet Ceremony formed in 2004, playing especially raw, noisy, super-fast hardcore, something people tag "powerviolence." It's worth knowing that Violence Violence, their 13-song debut LP (right, right), lasted just over 13 minutes. (The CD version appended a re-tooled take on the 2005, 7-song Ruined EP.) Early on, though, they'd mentioned Joy Division, Suicidal Tendencies, Pink Floyd, Negative Approach, and Tom Waits as influences, and by the time they released their third album, Rohnert Park, in 2010, they were doing something very different, essentially making good on the promise of their eclectic record collections. Ceremony slowed things down, got sludgier and noisier in a Siltbreeze sense, discovered some British post-punk roots, and reminded me at times of the Shadow Ring covering the Fall.

On Rohnert Park's opening track, "Into the Wayside Part I / Sick", vocalist Ross Farrar lists a bunch of things he's sick of, including Black Flag and the Cro-Mags. Fair enough. For a band who named itself after a Joy Division song, that's not necessarily surprising. It's especially unsurprising in 2010-- like saying you're sick of the records your father grew up listening to. If that wasn't enough, they finished out their time on the hardcore/punk label Bridge 9 with Ceremony 6 Cover Songs, an EP that found them tackling Pixies, Wire, and L7's version of "American Society".

Given their history, the stylistic shifts on Zoo, their fourth album (and first album for Matador), shouldn't be all that surprising. At least not for the reasons you might think. Yes, they've changed things up again and they've cleaned and clarified their sound, but we already knew they had a Wire homage in them. Plenty of bands have shed genre constraints to arrive at a successful second act, though even more have fallen flat on their faces. Those disasters can be interesting, at least. In Ceremony's case, they don't wipe out; worse than a colossal flop, they sound exceedingly mediocre, and this is their least compelling album by far.

Zoo features a couple of good songs, including opener "Hysteria", a true group punk sing-a-long. But too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory. It's their best sounding record: the dense atmosphere is charged and fuzzed-out in the right ways, creating an ambiance I can get sucked into even when the songwriting falters. Kudos to producer John Goodmanson here, though people focusing on the indie rock portions of his resume should remember he has plenty of experience with punk via those old Team Dresch albums, Bikini Kill's Reject All American, a couple of Unwound classics, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out and All Hands on the Bad One, among others. Here, he makes the band sound sturdier and more colorful than they've ever sounded. But it doesn't matter when the songwriting itself is monochromatic, mid-tempo Troggs rock.

All said, Zoo makes for a very long 36 minutes. By the time you get to the drifting feedback that ends the third track, "Repeating the Circle", they already sound bored. "Quarantine" would be a late-period Social Distortion song that didn't make it onto a late-period Social Distortion album. They nod to the Cramps on "Hotel" but by the end, you'll be nodding off. The more punked-up raver "Ordinary People"? Very ordinary. They do offer an interesting look, and taste, on downcast closer "Video", the longest song on the collection: Here we see them stretching things out like they did on the more experimental Rohnert Park, controlling a pent-up intensity-- and pleasingly bleak atmosphere-- that they're able to maintain for the low-key, slow-burn track's four minutes and change. It's a great finale.

Ceremony will be inevitably be compared to Fucked Up because they, too, are playing more ambitiously pop music than when they started, and for the same label. But Fucked Up pushed themselves in ways that paid big dividends: The multi-tracked operatics were as exciting for the listener as they were for the out-of-breath band. Here, it feels like a downgrade to go from the early frenetic madness or the rickety, exhilarating post-punk of Rohnert Park to these decent, very safe punk nods. There's not much on Zoo that you won't find on dozens of garage-rock albums released by smaller labels this year. It's hard to say why things went wrong, but on another of the better tracks, "Adult", Farrar sings that, as we get older, "we have to give up the things we love sometimes," a line that doesn't ring true. Even with a family and a new set of responsibilities, you can easily hold onto what got you into punk in the first place, and growing old shouldn't mean growing boring.